Well, it seems I’ve taken my eye off the ball on this one - the more clued-in members of the blogosphere noticed quite some time ago that the proposed symbol for the newly-ratified element 112 (dubbed copernicium) has been changed from Cp to Cn.

Given all the hoo-ha about the symbol Cp (see CW blog posts here, here and here for the full story), it’s not entirely surprising, but it does appear that the decision came much earlier in the process than any of us thought - this report from a meeting of the Iupac/Iupap joint working party in August doesn’t even mention Cp as a proposed symbol.

Sigurd Hofmann, who has the honour of naming element 112, will be recording a podcast for our Chemistry in its Element series sometime on the next few weeks, so tune in to hear the full story about the latest super-heavyweight to hit the periodic table.

In the meantime, Martyn Poliakoff and the Periodic table of videos team over at the University of Nottingham explain it pretty well in this little snippet:

So what do you all think - personally I’m pretty happy with the new symbol, there’s certainly a lot less room for confusion. I guess that more or less wraps up the naming of element 112, unless Iupac have any more surprises up their sleeves before the final naming in January…

Phillip Broadwith